The User Experience Blog for Website Architecture Planning

Approximately half of the world’s one billion websites don’t have sitemaps. If you are among the 50% yet to create a sitemap, then know that you are losing out on an important SEO strategy that can see you sail through the search engines rankings with no difficulty. Thousands of websites are launched every day and millions of web pages created. When they crawl sites, search engine spiders land anywhere on the site, and then move from one page to another with the aid of HTML codes.

To get the most from your XML sitemaps, you must understand several strategies that should be factored as you create a sitemap. Every website owner wants his or her website to make it to the first page in the SERPs, but that is not possible. Only a few out of over a billion websites in the world make it, and it is through implementing crucial SEO techniques over a long period of time. Note that search engines such as Google are constantly changing their algorithms aimed at ensuring that only the best websites are ranked higher, it is no longer easy to trick search engines into false website ranking.

Planning and creating a website’s structure is not an easy job for a large website. There are some specific steps that should be followed. This article will provide you with the main steps to make sure that the website architecture achieves your client’s expectations.

The very first step is to make a plan during the discovery phase of the website development project. If you do not make a detailed plan then you will most likely end up with a scope creep, unpredicted increases to the project’s scope. They call it project creep because it often sneeks up on you and it is hard to get compensated for the extra work that did not go through the approval process. You will have no base on which to defend yourself against and could waste lots of your time and money. It will help you avoid possible disagreements about the final product; if you follow the plan that was accepted by the client, then it is much easier to finalize a project and get paid.

A content inventory is the result and process of creating a comprehensive list of all content within a website. All website assets, regardless of their use should be accounted for and also where each is located. Your content inventory should also include an inventory of all links, internal and external and whether the link is good or bad.

A content inventory of all of your website assets will help you decide what type of analytic metrics are needed for a website content audit. If you do not know what type of content is on a website, it is impossible to know what to measure. For example, if a website contains embedded video, some great analytics data can be retrieved from 3rd party video websites like YouTube and Vimeo.

In this article, we will discuss and explain how to do a website content audit, why this is very useful, and how a content analysis tool can decrease your time and effort. But we will start first by answering the question “What is a content audit?”

What is a website content audit?

A content audit is a process that includes looking at all the content (data) in the website or a marketing funnel and determining the strong and weak points of it in order to maximize the marketing activities. This process is sometimes confused with a content inventory, which is just a list of all items on your website. When done in an effective way, a great content audit will help answer questions about which parts of the site an audience likes more and dislikes as well. It will give clear insight on potential issues that must be fixed in order to enhance the productivity of your website.

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